Sometimes it’s easy to forget just how instrumental great design can be when it comes to selling a product. This week we barely suppress a big silly grin over the packaging for a personal video, marvel at a movie poster designer’s sleight of hand, and positively adore the lengths to which another went to create a cover for one of the most anticipated short story collections in years. (Previous Cool Designs of the Week can be found here.)
Video Company’s Packaging
Brazil’s Balão Baleia (“Balloon Whale”) develops videos and party products, supplying footage of weddings and children’s birthdays on memory sticks. To keep alive the whimsical branding the company is known for, they came up with this wonderful, hand-assembled packaging for those devices, enlivening what could’ve been a very drab end product. So much fun!
‘Legend’ Film Poster
Please join us in toasting the designer who came up with this poster for the new Kray twins biopic “Legend.” Take a good long look.
What’s so clever about it? We’ll let The Guardian’s Benjamin Lee tell you via a recent Twitter post:
Really, just…wow. An amazing job, unnamed designer!
‘A Manual for Cleaning Women’ Book Cover Design
For those who are enthused by such things, the recent release of Lucia Berlin‘s short story collection “A Manual for Cleaning Women” is a sock in the eye to the likes of Karl Ove Knausgard and Elena Ferrante – writers who have transformed their lives into literary fiction without having the good grace to be dead first.
Inspired by the minimalist-but-magnificent American cover for the book, Justine Anweiler at its London publisher, Picador, really pushed the boat out for their version. Though she could’ve used stock imagery for her concept, she went the extra mile and had real clothes tags made and photographed with a real housekeeping uniform. The result pays homage to the American edition’s minimalism while arguably surpassing it in terms of impact. As an added bonus, the printed clothes tags were ordered in bulk and used for promotions. Very nicely done.
